Wine: LangeTwins 'closes the circle' with bottling facility

ACAMPO — LangeTwins Family Winery and Vineyards showed off Thursday its new, largely Italian-made bottling line and 50,000-square-foot bottling and case storage facility.

Randall Lange, who oversees the wine-making operation for the family business, said the multi-million investment really “closes the circle” for the winery opened in 2006 as a complement to what had for generations been a farming and winegrape business.

Now the entire wine producing and packaging process “from the vineyard to the glass,” can be handled to the LangeTwins own exacting standards, Lange said.

“To me it’s been an amazing eight years in this winery’s lifespan,” he said during an open house at the winery at Jahant and Lower Sacramento roads.

Most small- to medium-size wineries, such as LangeTwins, rely on so-called mobile bottlers, typically bottling and labeling equipment mounted in a truck trailer and moved from winery to winery.

The large capital investment makes it cost prohibitive to purchase a bottling line that may be used only a few weeks or months out of a year.

Camron King, executive director of the Lodi Winegrape Commission, said the new LangeTwins facility is “cutting-edge,” and really extends the winery’s ability to serve its customers — including private-label wine buyers and other wineries who contract for various wine-making services or products.

“They want to be able to provide not only custom crush, but services for their clients all the way through bottling,” he said. “It’s a smart opportunity and a smart way to position themselves.”

Lange said the new facility is much faster than a typical mobile bottler, able to fill, cap, label and case up to 200 bottles per minute or as many as 7,000, 12-bottle cases during a nine-hour shift.

Currently, however, it still is in start-up mode. Running at less than full speed, with adjustments and changes in equipment and procedures from time to time.

“We really feel within the year we will be running full time,” he said.

Besides providing bottling, materials and case-goods storage, the new building is topped with solar panels, bringing the LangeTwins electric production up to 1 megawatt, when combined with earlier photovoltaic systems.

Whether that’s enough to cover the winery operation’s full power demand has yet to be seen.

Shakib Ali, LangeTwins' new bottling line manager, said building and operating the new bottling line is fun but hard work and constantly challenging. He compared it to the often frantic demands of the annual fall grape harvest.

“What we do here is really every day,” he said. “It’s like harvest all year long.”